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The universality of art and artistic behaviors, their spontaneous appearance everywhere across the globe and through recorded human history, and the fact that in most cases they can be easily recognized artistic across cultures suggest that they derive from a natural, innate source: a universal human psychology. In this respect, the universality resembles another persis tent human proclivity: language use. Languages exist wherever human beings are found. Despite vocabulary surface grammar differences that make the six thousand or so separate local languages of the world mutually unintelligible, languages are never mutually incommensurable: they can be translated into one another. This is possible because language structure is shared across cultures because languages are tied to universal prelinguistic interests, desires, needs, and capacities.

Starting from infancy, language abilities unfold in routinely processes that reveal innate abilities of astounding complexity. Spoken competence in a natural language can be expected of every normal infant born into the society of human beings. That this is an inborn capacity is shown by the fact, for instance, that it requires strenuous for children to learn the historically recent practices of reading writing, whereas learning to talk requires no effort at all. (It has even been suggested that children should not be regarded as “learning” speech: with prompts from other speakers, children “grow” language as a natural extension of mental life, just as they grow from crawling to walking and running.)

Experimental and historical evidence—the stages of language acquisition, the cross-cultural nature of “motherese,” predictable formation universal grammar, a structure that underlies local generative grammars, is one such mechanism. This in turn is related to nonlinguistic needs, desires, and affects that also exhibit universal patterns. The tone stress of speech acts, for instance, are connected with facial expressions such as those indicating fear, grief, or mirth. Such affective experience is rooted in the mental mechanisms that govern species-typical experience and the expression of emotion, including emotional expression in language.

None of this denies the extent to which language is also massively embedded for every language user in culture and history. Our vocabularies and manners of expression are endlessly variable and operate meaning systems that, unlike the basic rule structures, are culturally In this respect, the field of natural languages resembles the art considered cross-culturally: both exhibit an interplay between, one hand, deep, innate structures and mechanisms of intellectual emotional life and, on the other hand, a vast ocean of historically contingent cultural material—the styles, vocabularies, and idiosyncrasies give both language use and art their individual cultural and meanings. No philosophy of art can succeed if it ignores either natural sources or its cultural character.

II

The idea that art is tied to human nature is not new, and it is worth look at a few signposts in the history of aesthetics to get a feel way the discussion has developed from ancient Greece to the present Plato and Aristotle worked out theories of human nature that in different ways to their philosophies of art. Plato’s famous of the arts as a source of knowledge, along with his call in Republic to have the arts censored by the state for the good of the populace, is often seen as a by-product of his metaphysics, his theory Forms, in which ideal archetypes govern and structure reality as we it. For Plato, art is always merely an imitation of an imitation, it represents—in painting, sculpture, acting, poetry, or prose— view of reality that leaves most people at best befuddled about nature of reality and at worst morally degraded. For Plato, the arts to incite all the wrong human emotions. Again and again in Plato’s dialogues we sense Plato’s feeling that the arts are dangerous.

Discussing the makeup of the human soul in the Republic,